Whither Russia? Autocracy Is Here for Now, but Is It Here to Stay?

J udging from some of the titles of recent books on Russia—for example, Richard Sakwa’s The Crisis of Russian Democracy, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s Political Consequences of Crony Capitalism inside Russia, and Tom Remington’s The Politics of Inequality in Russia—all is not well 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Corruption abounds, and state institutions are weak where they should be strong or strong where they should be weak. Under Vladimir Putin, democracy has deteriorated since the heady early days of the 1990s, and the negative externalities of Russia’s rocky economic transition— especially privatization—have made it so that social inequality permeates postcommunist society. The political and economic outcomes in Russia may be disappointing after 20 years but recent scholarship on the region is not. In this essay I review five new books dealing with various aspects of Russia’s transition. The picture that emerges from these diverse studies is one of unexpected outcomes from reformist policies imperfectly implemented; corrupted elites who pursue private gain over the public good; growing incongruency in state– society relations; and the importance of informal versus formal relationships and institutions in Russian political and economic processes. None of this bodes well for Russia’s future development as a democracy, but neither do these findings suggest that Putin’s autocracy is necessarily here to stay. Indeed, all five studies wrestle explicitly or implicitly with what is to become of Russia: Given all of its problems and its promise, will it slip further into autocracy or will it step back onto a democratic path? No one appears willing to give up completely on its prospects for political revival despite Putin’s return as president and his increasing propensity toward hardening his autocratic rule. The eight years of his first presidency, and the following four of his protégé, Dmitri Medvedev, have not produced an economic miracle. Although the Russian economy grew on average 8% year to year from 2000 to 2008, this was largely on the back of high world oil prices and the revenue windfalls they produced for Russia, rather than because of deft economic policies. The global economic crisis that hit Russia especially hard in 2008 due to its growing dependence on oil export revenues verified that Putinism did not represent a new developmental model. The wake of the crisis demonstrated that many of the basic governance problems that Russia suffered in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 remain more than two decades later. Indeed, predictably perhaps, some have worsened over time due to neglect—including pervasive state corruption and social inequality. The huge street demonstrations in December 2011 and the spring and summer of 2012 in response to a popular perception of electoral misconduct indicated that Russian society may not be as passive as Mr. Putin would like, and that his regime may Kathryn Stoner is a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. | |